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The Flex 14 in “stand” mode. The original version of this piece referred to the Lenovo Flex 14. Lenovo has replaced that model with the Flex 2 14. A Lenovo rep told us that the only difference between our original recommendation and this new Flex 2 14 is that the Flex 2 14 has a newer, better Intel Core i5-4210U processor and a hybrid hard drive and can be upgraded to a 1920×1080 touchscreen. We later found out that the Flex 2 14, unlike the original, does not have a removable battery or easy-to-access RAM or drive slots, limiting future upgradability. This is a big disappointment. The i5 processor and hybrid drive make the Flex 2 14 a better deal than the original; the high-res touchscreen is not an essential upgrade for the price. The following reviews are for the original version of the laptop. Reviews for the Flex 14 stay mostly in the range of 3 to 3.5 stars, but this is because the original review units Lenovo sent out came with a Core i5-4200U processor, 8 GB of RAM, an 128 GB SSD, and a suggested price of $1,000, which is madness. At that price, you can get an ultrabook that’s half the thickness and weight with triple the screen resolution and double the SSD space, so it’s no wonder the Flex 14 didn’t review well at $1,000. The $580 version, though, is much more sanely priced, which is why we’ve chosen it for our pick. CNET’s Dan Ackerman gave it 3.5 stars out of five under the premise that, if you keep the configuration under $800, it’s a good laptop. Once you get above $800 there are lots of better options, particularly when it comes to the display and build quality, echoing what we wrote above. Laptop Mag’s Sherri Smith said, “If you’re looking for a solid midrange touch-screen notebook that can handle most computing and multimedia tasks, the Flex 14′s $569 Core i3 or $669 Core i5 configurations with standard hard drives are pretty good choices.” We called in the original Flex 14 alongside a $580 Acer Aspire E1 and $650 Dell Inspiron 14R, using each as a daily machine for a few days. Of the three, I like the Flex 14 best, but it’s not stealing my heart in the way that, say, our favorite Ultrabook does. Then again, it’s cheaper than half the price and has more than half the power of that machine. Flaws but not dealbreakers The Flex 2 14 isn’t perfect. Obviously. It has no optical drive (eh) and like most budget laptop panels, the screen on the base model is washed out and suffers from bad viewing angles. It does have a hybrid drive with 8 GB of NAND cache, which is something we wished for on the first model. But the two biggest problems with the Flex 2 14 are the same ones that plague many of the IdeaPads that Lenovo sells on their site: Wi-Fi and price. The Flex 2 14 uses a single-band wireless-n radio. Unlike the dual-band Wi-Fi radios common in more expensive laptops, it only uses the slower and more crowded 2.4 GHz frequency band, not the 5 GHz band. And Lenovo restricts which Wi-Fi cards can be used in their laptops via BIOS whitelisting, so improving wireless performance is not as easy as installing a new Wi-Fi card.